


buried

by owlinaminor



Category: 1917 (Movie 2019), Bandstand - Oberacker/Oberacker & Taylor
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Grief/Mourning, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:15:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26196973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlinaminor/pseuds/owlinaminor
Summary: Eleanor raises her glass so that it flickers in the light, takes a long sip.  “I’m not like my daughters, Thomas Blake,” she says.He stares at her.  “What do you mean?”“I don’t need bedtime stories.”Tom Blake goes to the Schofields' for dinner, and remembers.
Relationships: Tom Blake/William Schofield, William Schofield/William Schofield's Wife
Comments: 8
Kudos: 52
Collections: 2nd devons writing challenges





	buried

**Author's Note:**

> I originally started writing this for a prompt we had in the server weeks ago _("I fought the war, I fought the war, I fought the war and the war won.")_ but then it took on kind-of a life of its own. it is, essentially, a canon-divergent au inspired by bandstand, because i strongly believe that donny novitski and tom blake are the same character with different levels of trauma.
> 
> cws for character death and a little emotional infidelity. nothing graphic for either.

> _JULIA: Michael is buried in some place called Manila. I’ll never get to Manila, I never got to say goodbye. A lot of things just vanished with no explanation and I want to know. How his hands were folded in the casket, if his uniform was pressed, if his hair was combed right. A million things that keep me up at night and I don’t need anything else erased, certainly not his name._
> 
> _DONNY: Trust me, you don’t ever wanna see Manila._

Tom Blake knocks three times on Eleanor Schofield’s door. The first: quiet, hesitant. And then: two louder, in quick succession. If he misread the street sign or the faded bronze numbers on the mailbox, he’d rather find out now than stand here in the wind.

He is raising his hand to knock a fourth time when the door swings open. Tom sees wood-paneled walls, a coat rack in the corner, a warm light emanating in from the kitchen—

“Are you Daddy’s friend?”

He looks down. The girl is ruddy-faced, as though she’s just been running, with golden braids streaming out behind her. She peers up at him with these big, blue-gray eyes, stares at him as though he’s done something wrong already, and something about her cheeks and eyes and the shape of her nose is so much like _him_ that Tom is shot through—nearly topples backwards down the stairs.

He closes his eyes, for a moment, and holds Schofield’s face in his mind. What would he do, if he walked through this doorway? Would he fill it? Would he stretch his arms, would he bend down—

When Tom opens his eyes, the girl is still watching him. Tom crouches and extends a hand for her to shake.

“I am,” he says. “I was. I’m Tom Blake. What’s your name?”

“Abigail.” She shakes his hand: her grip is strong, capturing the front half of his fingers and holding him steady. Instead of letting go after a couple of shakes, she pulls him forward into the house—yanking with so much force he almost falls over.

“Hold on, hold on,” Tom says, and he stands back up, shucks off his hat and jacket one-handed and puts them on the coatrack. “Okay. Now I’m ready.”

Abigail glares at him, as though he’s making her late to dinner. He apologizes and follows her into the kitchen.

He stops, as he sees Mrs. Schofield. He’s seen her photograph once or twice, fleeting glimpses in the candlelight. Schofield only pulled out his tin when he thought Tom was asleep, and Tom used to wonder if his wife always dressed like that, how she sounded, if she smiled often or kept her face neutral.

“Thomas Blake, I presume,” she says. And this is how she sounds: a low voice, like the deepest bell of a church tower, yet she delivers each syllable as though rehearsed. Perhaps she is not the bell itself, then, but the figure up on the balcony pulling the ropes. She has the arms for it, Tom thinks, and the figure, about as tall as he is and broad-shouldered. Her hair is tied in a loose braid, not at all like the precise coif of the picture—but her eyes, dark and piercing, are the same.

“Mrs. Schofield,” Tom replies. He has the strangest sense that he should bow—some ancient chivalrous instinct tugging on his spine. He walks closer, instead, and offers his hand.

“Oh—I’m sorry,” she says, “I’m all covered with flour.” She holds up two palms coated in white.

And Tom has to step back—out of politeness and out of his metaphors. If her shoulders are strong, it must be from carrying her daughters to bed.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “I didn’t see—”

She shakes her head. “Don’t worry.”

“I didn’t mean to offend—”

“Thomas.” She cocks her head at him, a small smile comes over her face. “Let’s start over. My name is Eleanor, it’s lovely to meet you. Thank you for coming for dinner.”

“Thank you for having me,” Tom replies. “I haven’t had a homecooked meal in—I don’t know how long. Oh, and I brought—” He holds up a finger, then practically sprints out into the hallway and retrieves a paper-wrapped parcel from his jacket pocket. “I brought this wine.”

“Thank you.”

“Is there anything I can do to help, or—”

“No, no, please make yourself at home. Abigail,” Eleanor adds, looking down at her daughter who’s been staring determinedly at Tom this whole time. “Why don’t you show Mr. Blake some of your paintings?”

Abigail takes Tom by the hand again. It’s surprising, to have her hold onto him like this. No, surprising isn’t the right word. It’s immense, heavy, as though she is asking him to hold the world—her world, which is of course the next world, which is of course a kinder world than Tom has known in a long time. Tom wonders, if he told her that this hand she’s holding has been used to fire guns, and throw grenades, and clench German soldiers at their throats, what would she do? Would she let go? Or would she ask him what his words meant, and keep walking?

He does not have time to tell her, anyway, because she is leading him to a table under the window in her bedroom. The table is low—about half as tall as she is—lit golden in the afternoon sun, and filled with watercolor paintings. Tom recognizes a study of her house, a few sunsets, a landscape that might be the park he passed on his walk here. He sees Eleanor, too, and another girl who looks like Abigail, but smaller and with a rounder face—her sister. The paintings are all softly colored in the same palette of ten shades, spots of green and brown and blue melting into each other. But the figures are easy to make out. The study of the park, especially: Tom picks it up to get a better look, admires the way Abigail has rendered a grove of oak trees, like earthbound clouds of green.

“Do you like them?” Tom glances down—Abigail is watching him again.

“I do. How much are you charging?” Tom asks, brandishing the park landscape. “I’d like to hang this one in my flat.”

Abigail reaches up and snatches it out of his hands. “Not for sale.”

“Alright, alright.” Tom puts his hands up.

Abigail returns that painting to the table, but not before he catches sight of another one beneath it. This painting is all greens and browns, too, but instead of trees and grass it’s the straps and pleats of a British uniform. Tom peers down, traces the planes of the soldier’s uniform with his finger. It’s hard to make out, features all smudged together, but something about the long face is familiar. Sad eyes under a helmet pulled down low.

“Is this… your dad?” Tom asks.

Abigail looks at the paper, follows the line of Tom’s finger. She says, “Yes. I made it for Sophie, ‘cause she doesn’t remember what he looked like.”

Tom picks the paper up, lets the soft colors shimmer in the fading sunlight. Schofield used to shimmer like this, lying in the grass on long afternoons. His skin faint gold, the lines on his forehead smoothed out. All of him so quiet, like a mirage in the desert: if you touch, he fades away. Tom ached to touch. Or at least, to draw—to trace his finger in the dirt or the bark or the back of a map folded in his pocket. He wasn’t writing yet, then, and he wants—one afternoon, just one, just a few minutes to hold and trace and keep before it’s gone with all the other soft days, drowned out by the trenches and shells.

“It’s a good likeness,” Tom says. He returns the paper to the table, lets his index finger rest just on the edge of Schofield’s face. He finds his voice is growing hoarse.

“Be careful,” Abigail replies. “The ink’s still wet.”

And it is—Tom’s finger comes away tinged in brownish-gold. As he wipes it off on his trousers, Eleanor’s voice emanates in from the other room.

“Abigail! Tell Mr. Blake dinner is ready.”

Abigail looks up at him. Her eyes—soft gray, discerning, just like his. “Dinner’s ready,” she says. And she extends her hand to him again.

Back down the hallway, Tom finds a table set up across where the tiled kitchen floor ends and the wood-paneled salon begins. It must have been there before, but now it’s impossible to miss: a white cloth draped elegantly over the sides, candles on either end, a pot roast in the center. Tom’s stomach rumbles at the smell.

Eleanor is standing at the head of the table, lighting candles, and as Tom watches, a small face peeks out of her skirts. The girl is tiny—so tiny that Tom has to go to his knees just to get face-to-face with her. She has the same features as her sister, but more rounded, her nose shorter, her eyes deep brown like her mother’s.

“Hello, Sophie,” Tom says, using that voice he used to use for new foals, at the farm, blinking awake for the first time.

She stares at him.

“Sophie.” And the girl turns to her mother. “Why don’t you finish setting the table?”

Sophie nods, golden curls bouncing lightly. She emerges from Eleanor’s skirt, looks up at Tom for a moment, and then takes a handful of cutlery her mother hands her from the counter.

As Tom watches, she circles the table, placing a knife and fork at each place. He blinks—and she’s wading through high grass, a summer breeze sailing through and nearly catching the bouquet of roses in her arms. She’s in a black dress, sleeves too long and collar tight at her neck, and she places the roses slowly, gently, on the grave. She reaches out one tiny hand and runs her fingers over an inscription she can’t yet read.

Tom shakes his head. It’s an eerie image—the whispering of the wind in the grass—and false. Schofield never had a funeral.

“Mr. Blake.” Tom looks down—Abigail is tugging at his sleeve. “Come on. Dinner.”

Tom’s hand shakes as he touches the chair at the foot of the table. He breathes in, breathes out, and pulls it in one smooth motion, then sits.

When he looks up, he finds Eleanor watching him. Quiet eyes taking in each movement. She used to watch Schofield like this, he imagines. She could see, in his posture when he crossed the threshold, if he’d had a long day at work. She must have read his expressions, too, those twitches of eyes and mouth that kept Tom up at night. She must have—

There is a jolt at Tom’s elbow. Abigail, pressing a tureen of roast potatoes into his arm.

“Mr. Blake,” she says. “Why aren’t you paying attention?”

“Abby,” Eleanor scolds. “Don’t be rude. I’m sure our guest has a lot on his mind.”

“No, I’m sorry,” Tom says, taking the dish and spooning potatoes onto his plate. They’re soft, buttery golden-brown, and his mouth waters at the smell. “I keep thinking about Scho—your father. But I can keep my mind here for the rest of dinner.”

Abigail turns to him, a new urgency in her eyes. “No, tell us. Please tell us. What was he like?”

Tom looks across the table: Sophie is watching him too, with wide eyes to match her sister’s. And Eleanor, dividing carrots onto her daughters’ plates, has stiffened, slightly—her back is straighter than it was before.

“Oh,” Tom says. “You want to hear about your dad.”

“Please,” Abigail repeats.

“Okay.” Tom takes a bite of potato—it’s as savory as it looks, all butter and salt—and tries to think of a story that’s appropriate. By the time he swallows, he’s found one.

“Okay. So it was October, right, my second week at the 8th. I was still green, getting my bearings. I mean, I knew, for sure, where the mess tent was and what time they served dinner, but that was about it.”

Sophie giggles. It’s a quiet sound but it echoes , and she seems as surprised as he does—she covers her mouth with her hands.

Tom smiles at her and goes on. “Your dad, at this point—well, he was already a lance corporal. He was helping train the group of new privates I arrived with. I’d met him my second day—nothing exciting, we just sat down next to each other at the mess. I thought he wasn’t eating enough, so I got him seconds.”

“Does everything revolve around food with you?” Abigail asks.

Tom crooks an index finger in her direction. “Yes. And your mom’s potatoes are the best I’ve had in years. Anyway, we were getting trained up on all the ins and outs of camp, how the 8th did things. That day two weeks in, Sarge told me and three other blokes to go fetch supplies from an outpost in the nearest town. It had just rained—oh yeah, this is important, it had just rained—and the roads were too muddy for a truck to get through. So they sent us to carry what we could on our backs, with Scho to supervise.”

“Scho?” Sophie echoes.

“Oh—sorry,” Tom says. “Your dad. Scho is what I called him, short for Schofield. He was leading the group and he’d sort-of quietly scout ahead, figuring out where the mud wasn’t too deep, then motion for us to follow. A very _watch and learn_ kind of teacher, he was. I remember asking him, if I got stuck, would he pull me out? And he just stared at me, like, I’d better not get stuck to begin with. I’m sure he wasn’t like this for you girls, but over in France, your dad was _mean.”_ Tom pulls a face for emphasis, stretching his face out with his hands, and watches as Abigail and Sophie laugh. Eleanor just looks at him, her face still blank.

“So,” Tom goes on, “we got there, the outpost blokes loaded us up with food, bullets, I forget what else. And on the way back—Scho said, we should all know the road, we could scout for ourselves. We did, but it was harder, laid down as we were with the full packs. I’d take a step, and then start sinking into the mud, like—” and he mimes leaning down, getting stuck, pulling out and taking a new step. Sophie giggles again. “I was doing alright, I got to the front of the group, and then from behind me I heard this really quiet, precise, _fu—_ oh, it was a rude word, sorry girls. So I look behind me, and it’s your dad.”

Tom hears two sharp inhales—they match the two pairs of eyes watching intently.

He grins, leans in toward the girls, and keeps talking. “He waited too long to take a step, I guess, and got stuck. He was up to his ankles in the mud by the time I noticed. And the funny thing—I’ll never forget the expression on his face, standing there. It was so resigned, like he could stand in the mud all day and he wouldn’t complain. That was your dad, always making the most of what the war threw at us. No complaints.”

Abigail nods proudly. Sophie keeps staring, this look in her eyes like she wants to propel herself right past Tom and into the story itself.

“We did pull him out, of course,” Tom goes on, leaning back in his chair. “Lost his boots, though. He had to walk back to camp barefoot.”

“Was Dad okay?” Sophie asks.

“Oh, sure,” Tom says. “He got first dibs sitting in front of the fire that night, though.”

Tom keeps talking about Schofield, smiling as the girls laugh and cheer. It’s strange, telling stories like this: for people who don’t already know them. The cadence is different. Tom can raise his voice, pause, move his hands, but he isn’t quite sure when to break for laughter. He feels like each story needs a moral, some pithy little _your dad was brave_ reminder that can echo through Abigail and Sophie’s heads when they go to sleep. And Tom isn’t lying, exactly, but the stories are not quite true, either. He leaves out details: the weight of a gun in his arms, Schofield’s face as he collapsed at the end of a march. The landscape, the way it was torn open, trees and grass and flowers all ripped apart, the marrow sucked away until nothing was left but bare earth.

Eleanor watches Tom, as he talks. She doesn’t laugh or ask questions—she just eats, methodically going through potatoes, then roast, then carrots.

She is strong, Tom thinks. He’s not sure how to describe it. Something in the way she sits, straight back against the chair, and the way she folds her hands on the table, like a schoolteacher waiting for her students’ attention. She stands to clear the dishes, insists Tom does not help her, and balances everything across her arms in two trips. Nimble, precise, as though she drew out a map beforehand.

She would have made a good soldier, Tom thinks, and then fights the urge to put his head down on the table or just get up and slam the door, get his damn loud mind out of this quiet house. A soldier? Because she has good posture and can balance dishes? Here he is, again, with the damn metaphors.

He uses the restroom, then sits back at the table, running lines in his head as she puts her girls to bed. He can hear her voice, low and murmuring, reading a bedtime story or saying a prayer for them to rest easy. Would Schofield do that, if he were here? He was a shit storyteller, could never get the pacing right, but maybe he would have learned, for his daughters. Maybe Tom could have taught him. and he hears Schofield’s voice in his head, echoing: _I had this buddy, another lance corporal by the name of Blake. Stupid fellow, always running into battle without a plan. He got chosen for an important mission, and I—I went with him._

“Tom?”

It’s Eleanor, coming down the stairs. She wipes her hands on her apron, then takes it off and hangs it on a hook by the edge of the kitchen, revealing a gingham skirt beneath.

“Would you like a nightcap?”

Tom nods. “Yes, please.”

She opens a cabinet above the stove, too high for the girls, and takes out a glass bottle of brandy. Half-full.

“This was Will’s favorite,” she says, pouring small portions into two tall glasses. “I always kept a bottle for him. I don’t know why. In case he came home, somehow.”

Tom takes his glass, shapes his palm to the cool surface. Brandy, huh. Figures, Schofield was always a little too classy for the rest of them.

Eleanor takes the seat across the table from Tom. They’re both on the long sides this time, no more head and foot. She raises her glass: the liquor shines golden-brown in the fluorescent light. Tom raises his glass to hers, they meet with a soft _clink._

They’re drinking to Schofield, he supposes, and he throws the shot back. The brandy burns in his throat, sends a slow warmth down to his chest.

“Tom,” Eleanor scolds. “This is good brandy. You’re supposed to savor it.”

“Oh.” Tom feels his face heat up. “I—oh. Sorry.”

She shakes her head, gives him a small smile, and pushes him the bottle so that he can pour himself another drink. This time, he sips it slowly, lets each mouthful grow warm in his throat before he swallows.

He watches Eleanor. Her strong shoulders, her small hands tucked around her glass. Her fingers are long and slender, like she should be playing piano in a big country house somewhere, not working long hours as a legal clerk just to keep her girls fed and clothed. Tom notices an ink stain, on her index finger, and wonders what she was writing.

“You didn’t talk much,” he says. “During dinner.”

Eleanor raises her glass so that it flickers in the light, takes a long sip. “I’m not like my daughters, Thomas Blake,” she says.

He stares at her. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t need bedtime stories.” And when he keeps staring, she puts her glass down and leans in. “I want to know what happened to my husband.”

“You mean—”

“How he died.”

All the heat is yanked out of the kitchen. Or at least, it is for Tom. Goosebumps rise on his skin and the fingers around his glass begin to shake.

“I can’t,” he says. “I mean, I—I don’t think—”

“Don’t think.” She puts her glass down and leans in, dark eyes peering into his. “Just tell me.”

He keeps shaking as she continues. “I’m not asking much. I just want to know where he was. What he said. If he was trying to save someone. It’s been three years, and all they told me is, he’s buried in some town called Écoust. I’ll never get to see Écoust.”

And this—this makes Tom sit up. He drains the rest of his glass, and then he reaches out and pours another one.

“That’s what they told you,” he says. “That he was buried.”

She nods, and keeps watching him.

Tom drains that new glass, too, then reaches out and pours another. He never used to need bravery, like this. It came to him in an instant, like an extra limb, like loading his rifle and pointing out. But to bring the war into this kitchen—Tom hasn’t told this story yet. He doesn’t know the cadence, the pacing. He has to drink the brandy, he has to let it sink in his throat, warm like a cruel facsimile of the sun beating down, April 6, 1917.

Will would want her to know, wouldn’t he. And so Tom has to tell her. He closes his eyes until he can see it, and then he begins.

“We were in the German trench. On the far side of No Man’s Land. It was abandoned, we hadn’t expected it to be abandoned, and—we were cocky, maybe. I was. I’d been given this mission, see, from General Erinmore himself, to go across Hun lines and deliver a message to the 2nd Devons, my brother’s regiment. We had to stop them from attacking the next morning. It would’ve been a massacre. And—and we had to cross No Man’s Land first, and go through their trench, and Erinmore said, the Germans have gone, but we didn’t really believe it, so to actually see them gone—”

Tom pauses, looks down at his hands, folded together on the table. His vision is going watery already.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m usually better at this.”

But Eleanor is just looking at him, quiet, not faltering.

“You’re doing fine,” she says. “Go on.”

Tom goes on. Funny, how clearly he can see it all—the trench, earthen walls all shrouded in shadow, the way their lanterns peered out and then reflected back, as though the light didn’t want to stray far. The bunks, all rusted metal, and an old photograph tacked onto one headboard of two brothers, in a field somewhere, one man’s arms around the other’s shoulders. The dusty smell of the place, dirt and stone tinged with the pungent sweetness of cans slowly going rotten.

“We went through the tunnel,” Tom says. “Found some bunks, some stores they’d abandoned. There was a rat—massive bugger—dragging a bag of something, probably rotten meat. And the rat—Scho noticed it first, the tripwire, and he was just telling me to get back when the ceiling came down.”

So many memories have gone hazy in Tom’s mind. The last year of the war is a blur, as though his brain saw Passchendaele and went, _alright, pack it in, wake me when you’re through._ He reads about his own battalion in old newspapers, just to get the names and towns right. But the Hun trench—Tom sees it when he closes his eyes. He hears Will’s voice echoing through the rafters in his bedroom, screaming into the wind.

“The—the ceiling came down,” Tom says, trying to keep hold of the crack in his voice. “It happened so fast. I didn’t know Will—Scho— _Will_ was down until I heard him screaming. He was buried—he was under all the rock. I followed his voice, I dug him out and all. I pulled him up and told him to wake up, _wake up,_ I’d lead us out.”

Tom hears it: a sob, rising like high tide in the back of his throat. Silt and salt water and foam, all rising, and any moment now he will break.

Tom went to the ocean. Summer 1918, on leave. Couldn’t bear going home, as Will had warned he would, so he took the train alone to the south of France and just sat there, looking out at the endless water and he endless sky. He felt the wind in his hair, the salt in his eyes. Tried to put it into words, like a story, like the end of the war was out there somewhere and he could just reach out and take it.

But he couldn’t, of course. He couldn’t reach far enough. When the war did end, as it had to, it was a matter of paperwork. Tom’s regiment didn’t get the news until two weeks later.

“I didn’t,” Tom says, then tries again. Eleanor is watching him, as though she knows what’s coming. “On our way out of the tunnel, there was this break—a shaft going down. Not wide, just a few feet. I jumped it, I told Will to follow. I thought he’d be behind me. And I turned, and I—and he wasn’t behind me. He wasn’t behind me. He—I heard him scream, and I heard him reach the bottom. He was screaming for me to keep going, and then the walls—everything was caving in, and I had to run. I had to run. I’m sorry.”

Tom takes a breath. The air rushes into his lungs all at once, cracking as it meets his diaphragm—the noise echoes like lightning in the quiet kitchen. Tom is aware, all at once, of the tears rolling down his face. Salt water. A tear rolls down into his mouth and lands, salty as brine, on his tongue.

Eleanor is not looking at him. She sits, shoulders hunched forward, hands clasped before her on the table. Tom leans in, too, and—she is shaking, ever so slightly, as though the wind has burst in from outside and pushed her like a sapling in a storm. Her head is bowed, the fluorescent lamp illuminates the top of her auburn curls.

She is deciding whether to kick him out.

Easy enough: Tom can do that for her. “I’m sorry,” he repeats, and he pushes his chair back—the legs scrape on the tiles—and stands, goes to retrieve his hat and coat. His hands are shaking, too, as he pulls the hat off the hook. Places it on his head front-first, like he should be lacing it up beneath his chin and strapping on a kit and gun.

He opens the door, has one foot across the threshold when—

“Wait.”

She crashes into his back. Her arms go up around his waist. Her face presses into him, he feels her sob silently through the layers of fabric.

They stay there for a long time, transfixed. The door hangs open. And then she steps back, wipes her eyes, and returns to the table.

“Have another drink,” she says.

Tom watches her: the way she wipes her eyes with a handkerchief, cleanly and methodically, as though she’s rehearsed this. She pours herself another glass of brandy, a taller one this time, and drains half of it in one go.

She looks up, finds him still in the doorway, and gestures at the chair across from her. “Well? Come on, sit down.”

Will would want him to sit. He sits.

The confession is easier like this: in the quiet.

Tom hasn’t checked the time, but it must be past nine by now. All the shadows on the street outside have grown long and dark, all the ghosts liner in the corners. The kitchen lamp casts a soft circle: the wooden table, Tom and Eleanor on the long ends, the floor beneath them, and the edge of the ice box behind Eleanor, holding the supplies for breakfast tomorrow. She is brilliant in the golden light, flickering softly—her eyes are darker, wider, and her skin almost glows.

Tom wonders—if Will looked at her like this, in torchlight, in candlelight. If he traced her soft cheeks, the planes of her neck. If he asked her to be quiet, the girls are sleeping—oh, Will was good at asking to be quiet, he’d do it when Tom interrogated him after lights-out in the bunks, he’d turn his back to Tom and burrow down into the jacket he used as a pillow and Tom would watch, the faint gray-gold of his hair in the shadows, the faint in-out of his chest as he breathed, until they both fell asleep.

“I loved him,” Tom says.

The words drop, like a stone into the center of a still lake: inevitable. Tom leans his chair back, in case she really does kick him out this time.

She looks at him—her wide, dark eyes, surveying, taking stock of his shadow in the low light.

“I know.”

Tom nearly falls off his chair. “You—what? How?”

“His letters,” she says. “He never said it, but I saw the way he wrote about you. He was just trying to get through the war, but you—you made him laugh. You gave him hope. I didn’t—” And here she looks down at the table, at her hands, clasped above it. “I didn’t know that it was mutual. But it doesn’t surprise me. You gave him hope.”

“And you gave him a reason to come home,” Tom replies. He reaches across the table and takes her hands—her nimble, strong hands—in his. The warmth of her palms seeps into his. There is a band of silver on her right ring finger: a thin band, inlaid with a blue stone that shimmers as it catches the light. It must be from him.

And for a moment, Tom sees Will—in the doorway, stepping out of the shadows. Will younger, his frame slimmer, his features lighter, a hint of stubble on his face, touring the house with shirtsleeves rolled up. Will in a suit, next, all slick black angles, leading Eleanor to the doorway by the hand and then swooping her up in his arms as they reach the threshold, she says something to make him laugh. Will older, then. The stubble on his face longer, lit softly by twilight, whispering a poem to the baby in his arms. Will in his uniform—not the uniform as Tom knew it, but newer, all green, still stiff, not yet coated in dust and faded blood. Will bends down slowly, carefully, to where Abigail is standing before him. His lips move: _I’ll come home, I promise._

“I’m sorry,” Tom says. His voice comes out cracked, tears and ghosts still lingering. “It should’ve been me.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Eleanor says. She rubs one thumb along the back of his hand: slow, warm.

“But it was. It was my mission. I chose him, it was my brother.”

“And did you make it to your brother?”

Tom looks up, meets her gaze. “What?”

“Did you make it to your brother?” she repeats. “Did you finish your mission?”

“Yes,” he says. The word falls heavy, like another confession. “Yes. I was late, but I—I stopped the battle. I saved them.”

“Then you did what you had to,” she says. “Both of you. He chose to follow you.”

_He chose to follow you._ That’s the trick, isn’t it? Erinmore, Mackenzie, all those high brass with their pressed uniforms and their dioramas, they knew nobody was fighting for them. Nobody was fighting for England either, not three years in. The grassy fields, the smokestack cities, the smiling families, they had all faded into mud and dust. You fought because somebody told you, _this is how you stay alive,_ and the man next to you in the trenches, maybe he put his hand on your shoulder, maybe he looked at you soft behind the campfire, maybe he pulled you awake at dawn. He asked you to see the end of the war, so you tried to see it, you tried to make him see it, too.

Erinmore threw Tom into the diorama, and he watched Will run after. Neither of them was supposed to make it. It was a story, constructed to sell papers: _yes, I sent the boy to his brother’s regiment, he died on the mission, so did his friend, so noble. Give them medals and plant Union Jacks at their graves._

Erinmore likes stories and poetry. Tom wonders if he’s ready any of T. Blake’s. Tom can picture it: General opens the Sunday paper with a flick of his wrist, all proper with his morning tea. He brings the cup to his lips, barely looks at his servant as she brings up a plate of fresh strawberries. He flips idly to page seven, eyes flicking over the ink, and then—the cup clatters to the table, the paper after it. He knows that name.

Tom wants to show them. All of them. Erinmore, the generals, the bankers, the legislators, all those cowards in their corner offices watching the trenches as they’d watch so many ants scraping about a tower of sand. He wants to show them—what, exactly, he isn’t sure. That he’s still here, maybe. That he remembers. With every poem, he gets closer to his thesis.

Eleanor is staring at him. Tom looks down: he’s still gripping her hands, so tight her knuckles have gone white.

He lets go, releasing pressure one finger at a time. But then no sooner has he freed her hands than she reaches for him again. She lifts his right hand and tilts it palm-up, links his fingers with hers.

“T. Blake,” she says. “I see your name in the papers, you know. I work at a legal office, and my sister works at a girls’ boarding school. Between us we get all the literary magazines.”

Tom looks down at her hands, at the silver band on her finger.

“I thought about using a pseudonym,” he says. “But it would be cowardly. Like an extra layer of armor.”

Eleanor is silent for a long moment, looking at him. She used to search Will’s face like this, she must have. Quiet in the twilight, looking past his words to the body beneath.

“I know why you’re doing it,” she says. “Who you’re telling the story for. Will would’ve hated the publicity, I think, but he’d like your style.”

And Tom sees—Will, sitting beside him at the campfire, writing out a letter while the rest of camp slept. Will never scribbled like Tom does. He moved his pen slowly, putting weight behind every stroke.

Tom always wondered who he was writing. Who got to open a letter, sealed like a secret, and trace the aftermath of his gentle hand. Now, he sits in front of her, and he wonders what she wrote back. When he read her letters, if he kept them safe in his breast pocket, or in that little tobacco tin. Sometimes Tom dreams of Will, and he can’t quite make out Will’s face. He surges forward, he gets down on his knees and tries to dig the body out, but he cannot find Will’s blue eyes, or the shape of his smile. When he clears the stones away, there is only dust.

And then he wakes, shaking with sweat, and grabs his notebook from the bedside table. He pulls his knees to his chest and writes, until his hands stop shaking. Words aren’t much, but they can tether you. _Here’s who I am right now. Here’s what I remember. Damn it, I’m still here, I still remember._

A chair scratches against the tile. Tom looks up: Eleanor stands. She pads to the cabinet above the sink and takes out a second bottle, this one cheap whiskey, and refills both glasses. They must have finished the brandy. She hands one glass to Tom, and then sits—not across the table, but beside him.

She sets the glasses down, leans her head on his shoulder. Her cheek is warm, a solid weight against his.

“I’m glad you were with him, Tom,” she says. “And thank you, for telling me.”

Thomas Blake is twenty-two years old. He was nineteen when he stepped out on General Erinmore’s mission. William Schofield was twenty-four.

Thomas Blake is twenty-two years old, and William Schofield is a pile of ash and stone somewhere beneath the French countryside. In two more years, Thomas Blake will be twenty-four, and William Schofield will still be a pile of ash and stone. In ten more years, in twenty, in thirty, Thomas Blake will keep counting sunsets, and William Schofield will become a block of limestone, perhaps, or he will be pulled up into the roots of an oak tree.

How many men are out there, Tom wonders. How many glazed-over eyes, arms reaching through the mud. How many dog tags trampled over by a thousand more tired feet. How many daughters will learn their fathers’ faces from photographs, from watercolor paintings.

Tom knows the official death counts. He has read the papers and, when the historians finish their dirty work of deciding what it all meant, he will read their books, too. But numbers are intangible. They don’t sink, onto your tongue or beneath the earth. Tom walks through military cemeteries sometimes and tries to picture the bodies beneath the dirt. He runs his fingers over the inscriptions and reads out each name, until he thinks he might be a ghost, too. And then he sits, at a tree by the fence, and writes until his wrist aches.

In his poems, Will Schofield is still twenty-four, solid, smiling. And in the little cottage at one end of Cookham, Eleanor Schofield cooks for her daughters and reads them bedtime stories.

“Don’t be a stranger,” she tells Tom as he crosses the threshold. He turns round to look at her, her stern face bathed in golden light.

Don’t be a stranger. Don’t be a ghost.

“I will do my best,” Tom says. And he steps out beneath the stars.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm gonna have to write another fix-it to make up for this one, huh?
> 
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